Time and Conservation at the ICOM-CC in Copenhagen

On September 8, in an exciting Theory and History session of ICOM-CC Triennial Meeting in Copenhagen, I delivered a paper titled Time and Conservation.

What does time mean in conservation? Is time present in conservation as an implicit or explicit dimension, and how does conservation, if at all, conceptualize time? By proposing a temporal critique of conservation, this paper argues that thinking time has been absent from the narratives of conservation, its episteme, theoretical and research-generating activities, and from its practical theoretical engagement with the material world. Reviewing varying implicit manifestations of time in conservation, it subsequently proposes an alternative way of thinking about time.